A small story that was published on the Egyptian website Sut El Umma at the start of September has created a huge stir in the country’s media circles. The story was about nothing more than a meeting on the campus of the University of Cairo between its president, Mohamed Othman Elkhosht, a journalist and chairman of the Supreme Media Council Karam Jabr, and Dr. Ayman Mansour Nada, who had been in charge of the radio and television section of the university’s mass communications department.

At the meeting, according to the report, “The air was cleared between Dr. Nada and the university, and all agreed to turn a new page.” A minor story, except that behind it lay a complicated affair that exposes how the regime acts against those who dare criticize or oppose it, reveal its failures and suggest ways to fix them.

The affair goes back to March 2021, when Dr. Nada uploaded onto Facebook an article sharply criticizing Egyptian journalists. “Our media has no strength or vitality. It’s an animal that anyone with money or power can ride… Our media doesn’t represent us, doesn’t reflect our cultural identity, doesn’t fulfill our social needs and is incapable of giving expression to our dreams and desires.” Nada didn’t spare his venom from certain writers and editors, including the head of the Supreme Media Council.

Shortly afterwards, he was called by the president of the University of Cairo, where Nada teaches, to a meeting to be reprimanded and warned. At the same time, Jabr and a host of other journalists filed lawsuits against him, claiming that Nada had damaged their good names, the journalism profession and the authorities that oversee it.

A year later Nada was found guilty by a court, which gave him a suspended sentence of one year and a suspended fine of 20,000 Egyptian pounds (about $1,050). In its verdict, the court said Nada “published falsehoods when he stated that Egyptian media is disrespectful, makes up stories and silences opponents of the regime. Publishing false information like this harms the public interest and public order.” It wasn’t reported whether the judges were able to refrain from laughing when they read out the decision.

Nada assigns the blame for the state of Egyptian media on Ahmad Shaaban, an aide to Abbas Kamel, the head of Egyptian intelligence. He holds the “communications portfolio” and is in charge, among other things, of “taking care of public consciousness.” Shaaban is the one who deals with newspaper editors, dictates official policy lines to them, issues warnings and threats, and, in the event of a violation, fires the editors responsible for it.

Egyptian intelligence even controls several important media outlets, among them the Al-Hayat, CBC and Al-Nahar television networks, the ON media group, as well as the newspapers Youm7 (Seventh Day) and Sut El Umma (Voice of the People). Criticizing editors is tantamount to criticizing the intelligence authorities.

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In the wake of a court decision like that, Nada was no longer able to keep teaching at the university or practice the profession of journalism, but he did upload a series of stories onto his Facebook page starting last March. In the first two articles in the series, it appeared that the professor of media had learned his lesson and now understood what every other Egyptian journalist knows. The articles dealt with the achievements of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi in Egypt’s economic development and national security. But then Nada noted that “the coin has two sides” and that he intended to examine the president’s failures.

In May, Nada published a long story under the headline “He promised us a land of milk and honey,” in which he detailed 20 failures by the president during his eight years in power. Among those are the Renaissance Dam that Ethiopia is building on the Nile River and Egypt has been unable to stop, the transfer of the Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi control, the large amount of debt that Egypt has amassed and the regime’s failure to rescue the economy, the declining status of Egyptian media, the suppression of human rights and other faults that Nada proposed to examine in the framework of the national dialogue that the president has announced.

Publishing an article like that requires either special courage or great stupidity, and Nada isn’t stupid. Within an hour after the article was uploaded, he was called in for questioning and the story was taken down from his Facebook page. Nada refused to explain why he removed the article but denied that he had been pressured to do so. To the good souls who accused him of surrendering to the regime after criticizing it, he replied: “I’ve been out of work for 15 months. I haven’t been invited to appear on talk shows or television… Where were you when they attacked me and put me on trial?”

To Nada’s good fortune, Egypt is currently under U.S. pressure to strengthen its democracy, to stop suppressing human rights and allow more freedom of speech. Washington has frozen some $130 million of foreign aid. Now, when Egypt is seeking a giant loan from the International Monetary Fund, it aims to show that it’s improving its human flights record as a quid pro quo for American support for the loan. Thus, instead of putting Nada on trial, it was decided to hold a “meeting of reconciliation” with the university and “turn a new page.” Nada is now waiting to see whether that means he’s getting his old job back.